It wasn't even 40 days!

Hi, everyone,

It's Me. I'm taking a bit of a break right now. We are in a typhoon that the moment. Actually, I think the worst of it has passed, but it's still raining some. The wind has stopped for the most part, though.

Unfortunately, we rented a clunker for a house. It's a split level, which means we have a part of our house that is lower than the ground. Our entire property seems to drain into the driveway, which connects to that lower part of the house. There are drains in the driveway, but they can't keep up with the rain, so, yeah. A went down to check and we had several inches of water on the floor downstairs already. I tend to drop things on the floor around me when I'm teaching, so several of our textbooks got wet and we had to put everything up on higher shelves in the room and move a few things upstairs. We improvised some sandbags using plastic shopping bags and mud from the backyard and got the flow of water into the house mostly stopped.

It sucks. But there are people here whose entire home is below the predominant street level. These people are now out there scrambling for someplace to be with their families. Our driver's home is 8' above ground and as of a few hours ago, the water was closing in. We haven't had contact with him since then. We imagine he has more important things to do at the moment than answer the phone.

This country has serious drainage issues. You would think that this would be one of the fundamental issues that the government would be dealing with pretty hard-core, but no. There are some drainage-improvement projects going on around the country that we've seen, but there is still a lot, lot, lot more to be done. Though, we just had about 18 hours of pure, heavy, unceasing rain dropped on us. There's probably only so much drainage that can be done before it just all gets overburdened. Still, it's got to be better than this.